Comment by dredmorbius
9 days ago
For backups, latency is far less an issue than bandwidth.
Latency is defined by physics (speed of light, through specific conductors or fibres).
Bandwidth is determined by technology, which has advanced markedly in the past 25 years.
Even a quarter century ago, the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes was pretty good, even if the latency was high. Physical media transfer to multiple distant points remains a viable back-up strategy should you happen to be bandwidth-constrained in realtime links. The media themselves can be rotated / reused multiple times.
Various cloud service providers have offered such services, effectively a datacentre-in-a-truck, which loads up current data and delivers it, physically, to an off-site or cloud location. A similar current offering from AWS is data transfer terminals: <https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-retires-snowm...>.
I’ve covered those points already in other responses. It’s probably worth reading them before assuming I don’t know the differences between the most basic of networking terms.
I was also specifically responding to the GPs point about latency for DB replication. For backups, one wouldn’t have used live replication back then (nor even now, outside of a few enterprise edge cases).
Snowmobile and its ilk was a hugely expensive service by the way. I’ve spent a fair amount of time migrating broadcasters and movie studios to AWS and it was always cheaper and less risky to upload petabytes from the data centre than it was to ship HDDs to AWS. So after conversations with our AWS account manager and running the numbers, we always ended up just uploading the stuff ourselves.
I’m sure there was a customer who benefited from such a service, but we had petabytes and it wasn’t us. And anyone I worked with who had larger storage requirements didn’t use vanilla S3, so I can’t see how Snowmobile would have worked for them either.